RECOMMENDED

As part of his broader study of “industrialized space” in the era of globalization, photographer and installation artist Mark Curran honed in on the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Research complex in Leixlip, Ireland that has since been closed down as the multinational technology giant went in search of cheaper labor. If we did not know the back story, we would look at Curran’s unframed, large-format photographic documentary portraits of the factory’s workers—tacked on the gallery’s walls—not as commentaries on the depredations of corporate capitalism, but as reflections on how individuals have become trapped in a technological environment, in which, in this case, they are wrapped in sterile white gowns, gloves and caps in order to protect the environment from them. Curran’s subjects, in frontal poses, jar through their juxtaposition of all-too-human faces and the inhuman workplace that other human beings have created. Curran’s anti-capitalist critique and the critique of technology that his images betray operate somewhat at cross-purposes, yet both have their truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 19 at the DePaul University Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore

A work in the exhibition

By Chris Miller

Warning! The current exhibition at DePaul University Art Museum contains some laughably bad-ugly paintings. On wall labels alongside each work, director and curator Louise Lincoln explains exactly why each and every piece in this show of rejected art is as worthless as they might appear. Unlike the words written on the walls of the Modern Wing, where the best contemporary art is sometimes validated by the most unpredictable explanations, the labels here give reason for the museum to discard each work.

“La Trini” by Jose Puyet (1922-2004) “has not transcended its probably intended context of a bar or restaurant catering to men.” Another, titled “Awakening Dawn” by Gary Grotely (b. 1945), “appeals to a niche commercial market; it does not fall within collecting guidelines” of the museum. “Toledo (Moving Earth ),” by Gerald Hartley, is “reminiscent of the work of the Abstract Expressionists,” but “is hampered by its small scale and the overall quality of kitsch.” Read the rest of this entry »

Siamak Filizadeh

RECOMMENDED

What would a young, urban, sensitive artist feel about growing up in Iran? Yes, he or she would HATE the repression, hypocrisy and, worst of all, banality, of a cleric-run state in the modern world. And so one enters this exhibition confronted by the monumental image of a crumbling statue of some self-righteous Imam being fellatioed by a hot, pink babe. The current regime is not going to last very long—there’s too much pressure from an outside world that offers young people more appealing alternatives. But what, other than anger, contempt, despair and disgust can these young artists offer? Where is a vision for a new Persian man or woman in a new Persian world? The only positive qualities found here are vigor and humor—especially in the cartoonish painting of Siamak Filizadeh and the brightly painted, poignant caricature sculptures by Bita Fayyazi. It’s notable that both them are still living in Tehran. Unfortunately, the most enjoyable part of this exhibition is the Persian classical music being played within one of the video installations. For whatever reason, young, educated Iranians seem more connected to their great tradition in music instead of the visual arts. Although, we should keep in mind that these thirty-six artists are just the ones chosen by the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. (Chris Miller)

Through November 22 at the DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave. A review focused on this exhibition’s photographers ran in the October 15 issue.

RECOMMENDED

Google anything about Japanese prints and eventually you will end up at Floatingworld.com, an internet art dealer based right here in Chicago, which has just opened an amazing 8,200-square-foot display space in Lincoln Park. (That’s four times larger than the Buckingham Japanese print gallery at the Art Institute). It’s a simple, beautiful space, something like an upscale storefront restaurant, and perfect for the delectation of a genre that’s meant to be tasty and pleasing. The first entrée is a retrospective of Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000), an artist best known for his perfection of the laborious mezzotint technique that had all but disappeared in the twentieth-century. His monochrome kitchen table still-lifes from the 1950s feel like Japanese variants on  Giorgio Morandi, but as he further explored his medium, his work got smaller, more colorful, and ever more precious, to the point where he was making a new kind of graphic jewelry. And despite spending his adult life in Paris and San Francisco, his later work feels ever more Japanese—i.e., more natural and evanescent. Happily, the gallery displays these prints outside the protective but annoying glass frames that are so necessary in public museums. This exhibition also includes the metal plates that were used in the printing process. In the shrinking world of art galleries, this ambitious new space, with its large public exhibitions, is bucking the trend, and let’s hope it’s not as evanescent as the aesthetic it will display. (Chris Miller)

Through November 30 at Floating World Gallery, 858 W. Armitage, #148.

RECOMMENDED

The new novelty star on the photography scene is “Cooper: The Photographer Cat,” collared by his owners, filmmakers Michael and Deirdre Cross, with a micro digital camera programmed to snap a color shot every two minutes, wherever Cooper may roam around house and garden. This, of course, is not a cat’s eye view of the world—the camera doesn’t see what a cat does, what the camera captures is not necessarily what Cooper cares about or even notices, and the Crosses have so many images from which to choose that their selection of eighteen of them for this show has to reflect their own visual taste, which runs to striking views, enhanced by the blurs and streaks created by the animal’s movements, of brilliant abstractions of a nature that is dominating when seen from the ground—as when we are crawling in the grass. Of course, there is the odd domestic scene like an unflattering take on a pair of human legs. Cooper is the surrogate for the Crosses who did not want to or were not aware that they could go down on their all fours with cameras strapped around their necks and get the same results. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 11 at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon, (773)755-5100

RECOMMENDED

Be prepared for the shock of your political life when you glom on to the photos of the nine feisty conceptual and documentary Iranian shooters who are wilder and woollier than any but the Chinese could hope to be. Did you know that more sex-change operations are done in Iran each year than anywhere else but Thailand? Newsha Tavakolian shows us the life of “Maria,” once a male truck driver and now a beefy coffee-shop waitress. Are you looking for women in uniform? You will be blown away when you see the female cops in Tehran captured by Abbas Kowsare who are dressed in black chadours and point their assault rifles in your face. Is postmodern cultural criticism to your taste? Farhan Moshiri and Shirin Allabadi trump Ad Busters in their “Operation Supermarket” series, in which they let us feast our eyes on their “Hejab Barbie Wooo.” Not to mention Vahid Sharifian who gets away with kinky performance shots where he simulates bestiality, as when he mounts a lioness from behind in his birthday suit in “Queen of the Jungle (If I had a Gun).” And that is only the beginning. Whatever happens in Washington’s strategic confrontation with Tehran, the Iranians have already won the culture war. (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 22 at DePaul University Art Museum, 2320 N. Kenmore.

RECOMMENDED

On a quest to discover whether Chicago’s green spaces can “yield the same meaning, as say, Walden Pond did for Henry David Thoreau,” Bill Guy took off with his camera around the city shooting color photos of parks, beaches and swathes of grass alongside railroad tracks. To his credit, Guy did not abstract snippets of “nature” from the surroundings of “civilization,” but placed the former ruthlessly within their context of concrete and metal, producing images that might be scenes from Thoreau’s worst nightmares–snowboarders cavorting or sprawled on slushy hills, waders disporting themselves in the lake and amblers pressing their noses through chain-link fences to take in slices of unkempt vegetation squeezed by skyscrapers. Guy is guided by Thoreau’s dictum that “in wilderness is the salvation of the world.” It is up to the viewer to decide if Guy leaves any wilderness in the picture, and if the sights that we see every day beckon us toward salvation. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 2 at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon

By Jason Foumberg

“A springtime strip” is the name of an editorial recently published in the University of Chicago’s student newspaper in which its writer—a freshman—bemoans his peers’ revealing dress in the warmer months. “Do our students become tramps to more effectively enjoy the weather, or do they use the weather as an excuse to more effectively become tramps?” (This sentence and others were decried by readers as hateful and misogynist, and later redacted by the paper’s editor.) The writer frets over short shorts not longer than its wearer’s pinky finger, and men’s “thin, transparent, often sweat-stained T-shirts meant to be worn as underwear.”

Several days later, in a news segment called “The Patdown,” WGN reporter Pat Tomasulo headed out to the lake shore to fret about topless men. Who should and should not go shirtless was the gist of the reporter’s commentary, with a few nods to short shorts and peek-a-boo butts. For comic relief, and perhaps as a hyperbolic example, Pat jogged a little wearing a black suit and tie in the warm spring sun.

Besides being excuses to point at semi-naked bodies in public, these two incidents beg the question, are we indecent? Has our sense of good taste fallen behind our sense of fashion? I had the opportunity to ask Timothy Long, curator of the clothing collection at the Chicago History Museum, if he finds the current styles of dress to be inferior to times past. With a huge trove of clothes at his disposal—more than 50,000 objects mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries—Long withheld judgment, instead opting for the long view. We don’t follow trends or adhere to tastemakers anymore, he said, although certainly we’re more inclined toward the casual. For reference, we were inside the exhibition “Chic Chicago,” a historical tour of women’s couture that traces the development of the modern woman through her dress. (To boot, each dress on view was worn by a Chicago socialite.) Read the rest of this entry »

Steph Wesolowski, "Past and Present" (2008)

RECOMMENDED

The five young photographers in the University’s annual student exhibition share a passion for soft focus, despite the wide variations in their projects and approaches. Jessica Saia goes the funky route with her indistinct color shot of a man sitting at a lamp-lit table in the middle of a residential street at night; Julie Elliott goes traditional when she offers up a misty black-and-white study of an isolated old store in the hinterlands of Oilfield, Illinois; Tom Callahan invites speculation with his deeply shadowed black-and-white abstraction of what seem to be water droplets under a dull moon; Amy Nohl also piques the imagination with her blurred black-and-white shot of a room that appears to be dominated by a convoluted apparatus; and Steph Wesolowski creates wonderment with her faded digital street scene in which a girl dressed in pink stands in front of two guys in black and white hanging out on the sidewalk. What are we to make of these enigmas and indeterminacies? Of youth seeing life through a hazy lens? Or does it reflect the sensibility of the show’s guest juror, Barbara Wiesen? A DePaul art professor hints that we are seeing the world through Wiesen’s eyes. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 14 at DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore

Hank Willis Thomas, “Smokin Joe isn’t j’mama” (1978/2006)

RECOMMENDED

From straight documentary to cultural criticism of representation; from celebrations of tradition to biting postmodern play; from sentimentality to irony, this lavish exhibition is the most brilliant survey of recent African-American photography ever to hit Chicago. The contemporary stars–Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Willie Robert Middlebrook, et al.–are in the house, but so are less well-known lights whose works deserve long looks. For stabbing wit, no one is better than Hank Willis Thomas whose “Smokin Joe isn’t j’mama” (1978/2006) captures his chunky subject donning a blue bonnet as he sits leaning over a stack of pancakes with an air of bemusement. For the recovery of lost memories, Thomas comes through again with “The Oft Forgotten Flower Children of Harlem” (1969/2006), which shows the hippies in all their laid-back splendor hanging out on the street–icons of peace and love with a dash of Jimi Hendrix. Thomas does it all with panache, but that is just a slice of this stellar show. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 14 at DePaul University Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore